


The Path to Hell

by Barbedbeat



Category: Original Work
Genre: Steampunk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 15:18:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16621454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barbedbeat/pseuds/Barbedbeat
Summary: Excerpt from my novel in the works.





	The Path to Hell

Smug lay awake in the darkness, trembling fingers tormenting her lower lip in a mechanical motion.  
No matter how hard she’d tried to choke them, the flames that seared her brain didn’t stop crackling, scaring the sleep away, torturing her, burning her mind at the wick.  
The clock on the wall marked 1:14 am when she decided she couldn’t take it anymore.  
Smug kicked her covers away and had started dressing up, feveredly, haphazardly, as if the turmoil in her soul had bled into her muscles, turning them into jerking, rickety pistons.  
Once her boots had been fastened, she’d hovered for an instant before the mirror, and felt her stomach drop to the ground.  
The eyes she could see reflected in there, they weren’t hers.  
There was no more light in them, only a rippling pond of unfathomable darkness.  
There was a second, a mere flash of time, in which she’d felt herself crumble, every fiber shaking with agony as something else emerged.  
It was something alien and horrid and violent, and it scared her to death.  
She had to resist the urge to yank that mirror off the wall and slam it onto the tiles below, shattering that image along with the glass that had brought it to life.  
Her head swayed to the side, trying to escape that grisly view, nausea mounting in waves through her stomach.  
She clawed at the wall for support, and hid her face in a sleeve.  
She could hear the roar of her own blood, and her temples throbbed something fierce.  
The beating of her heart sounded like the thunder of a maddened drum, one that got louder and louder with every passing second, reaching a fever-pitch, until she could hear nothing but _them_.  
Gunshots.  
They were there, always, lying in wait in the darkest, softest spots of her brain, only to emerge in all their violence the moment her guard fell.  
Smug hunched over, eyes open wide, the steely maws of panic crushing her ribcage.  
Her room tilted sharply as she gasped for air, fear clamping her windpipe close.  
Pain shot through her knees as they impacted on the floor, and before she could realize it, she was screaming.

 

Her surroundings swirled out of control, nothing but a black pinprick at the back of her consciousness.  
She was lost, caged too deep down the well of her own anguish for her perception to function properly, and she had no idea how much time had passed before she finally felt it.  
The grip of two hands over her shoulders, clammy and forceful and desperate.

“Zadie, Zadie, calm-- calm down, please, oh Ancients, I beg you...”

Smug inhaled violently, snapping out of her trance.  
All lights had been turned on, and in their bright glow she could see her mother kneeling down before her, ghastly pale, a primal kind of worry etched in her features.  
“Mum...”  
Her voice had come out in a wail, coarse and harsh with strain.  
“Mum!!”  
She was calling out to her, like a lost, wounded cub trapped at the bottom of a ravine.  
Suddenly, she was small again, nothing but a helpless, inconsolable child longing for the fleeting warmth of a hug.  
Her arms shot forward, wrapping themselves around her mother’s waist, drawing her close and closer still, cradling her as sobs wracked her chest in unstoppable spasms.  
She felt her mother’s fingers caress her hair, trying to soothe her shivers, to no avail.  
“Zadie, girl, I’m here. You’re safe now, I’m here.”  
“Don’t let me go.”  
“No. No, I won’t. I won’t baby girl, I won’t.”  
Smug felt her clutch tighten to the point of discomfort.  
They stayed like this for what felt like ages, laced together like wanderers in a gale, cold and scared and alone.  
Smug had pressed her forehead against her mother’s body, eyes squeezed shut against the images that kept flashing in her head, striving to find some respite from the smell of blood and gunpowder that had fouled her nostrils.  
It took her a while to realize her mother had started crying too, silent tears streaming down her face.  
Smug raised her eyes to meet hers, and found them full of questions.  
Angry, devastated questions, hounding her gaze in search of a culprit.  
And it terrified her to the core.  
When her mother’s lips quivered open, Smug felt herself wither.  
“What happened?”  
Silence fell, and it was oppressive.  
“Zadie. What happened? Please, child, talk to me. Tell me-- tell me everything, tell me what it is that’s destroying you so. I have to know, I need to know what it was-- who it was, I...”  
Her mother sighed, and there was rage glistening behind her tears.  
“I cannot help you if you don’t.”  
Smug blinked, befuddled.  
Suddenly, she felt numb. Deathly so.  
It was as if her very brain had begun sinking deeper inside her cranium, building a thick wall of refusal around itself.  
The sole thought of speaking those words, recounting what had come to pass had filled her veins with ice.  
Putting what she’d witnessed-- what she felt-- to sound would make it coalesce before her in all its devastating horror, and she wasn’t sure she could stand it. It would have meant letting the tendrils of that ugly thing that lay dormant within her tear her apart, and she couldn’t even start imagining the pain that would have ensued.  
Like in a dream, she saw herself slither backwards, disentangling her limbs from that embrace she had so viscerally craved.  
She hoisted herself on her feet, her visage as white and blank as paper, and looked down at the figure huddled at her feet.  
“I can’t.”  
Her own voice sounded like a distant chime, weak and disembodied.  
She saw betrayal smoldering in her mother’s stare, her brow creasing with bewilderment, though she did not care.  
There was something else in the room with them now.  
It was a void, an unfillable gap that had torn open between them, like a wound oozing with the cankerous purulence of confusion and mistrust.  
“You wouldn’t understand.”  
Smug stepped over her mother’s body and headed towards the door.  
“Where in Hell are you going, at this time? Have you gone mad?”  
The sailor nodded and grabbed her hat from the coathanger.  
“I think so. Still, there’s something I need to do, mum. I have to go.”  
Her mother’s glare felt like a hot iron prodding at the back of her skull.  
“This is not you, Zadie. This is not my daughter.”  
Smug’s fingers closed around the doorknob.  
They were cold and stiff, twitching with minute spasms as her mind tunneled on the goal it had fixated onto, insensitive to anything else.  
“I have to go,” she repeated.  
“I’m sorry, mum. For everything.”  
She pressed her hat on her scalp and stepped into the night, frost cracking underneath her feet as she let the darkness swallow her, quietly communing with the strangling blackness that had taken hold of her soul.

 

Smug walked and walked, her soles thumping softly on the whitened cobblestones underneath.  
The city was deserted, and fog seemed to pad every sound, ensnaring it within the folds of its grim pall.  
Rare halos of light marked her path, street lamps rising their smouldering lanterns above the plumes of grey that swirled through the air, their stoic flickering wounding her eyes.  
She was cold.  
No matter how tightly she wrapped her arms around her torso, the shakes simply refused to stop.  
By the time she’d reached the ancient Market square, her teeth were clattering wildly, and an uncomfortable tingle flared through her toes every time her heels tapped the ground.  
The thought of going back never once crossed her mental horizon.  
She kept going, letting her legs guide her across the unseen city.  
She walked for hours, fueled by nothing but that obsessive idea that had nestled in her brain, red and bright like a hissing ember, and just as excruciating.  
Her knees threatened to give out when she came in sight of the Ducal Palace, and the bitter taste of bile climbed all the way to her tongue.  
She spat it out, saliva splattering on the copper tiles below, a bead of sweat sliding down her spine.  
Once she’d passed it, taking a sharp right and diving straight into Dunmore Lane, she could feel her muscles relax a fraction, along with the hard thumping in her chest.  
She was a mere couple of blocks away from her goal when a voice rippled through the silence, sending her pulse galloping.

“Sir! Sir, stop right there!”  
Smug turned around, and could see the red blur of a uniform making their way towards her.  
“Sir, what are you-- oh.”  
A stocky man had slipped out of the mist, his ginger whiskers flapping with his every movement, a shiny badge pinned on his chest.  
A city guard.  
“I-- I’m sorry, madam, for a moment I thought...”  
Smug saw him squint, taking in her considerable height, before resuming.  
“At any rate, you shouldn’t be out at such an unseemly hour, especially unaccompanied. At this time, only lowlives and cutthroats can be found roaming Dunmore’s streets. I’m sure you don’t fall into either of these persuasions, but it is my duty as public officer to suggest you take the first steamhorse back to your abode.”  
Smug shook her head.  
“Not going to happen, agent. I need to go somewhere.”  
The officer crossed his arms, halfway between the amused and the irate.  
“Oh, really? And where to, if you don’t mind me asking?”  
“I’m going to church.”  
The man snickered, a trail of condensation shooting out of his nostrils.  
“To church? Now, that’s a good one!”  
He slapped his thigh with a gloved hand.  
“I’m not sure what game you’re playing, but I’m quite convinced you know as well as I do that the Shrine has shut its gates at sundown.”  
“The Shrine, maybe. But the urn it’s always available outside of its portals.”  
She saw him blink, a jolt of comprehension narrowing his eyes.  
“Oh. I see.”  
The guard rubbed his chin, suddenly pensive.  
“Listen, madam. I don’t want to intrude, but…”  
His gaze lingered on her face one second too long for comfort.  
Smug looked like a mess, and she knew it.  
“... as I said, it’s a wicked hour this one. I’d feel more at ease escorting you to the gates at least. It’s in my patrol route anyway, and--”  
She interrupted him with a mighty shrug.  
“Do as you damn well please, officer. As long as we stop blabbering and get a move on, all is good.”  
She wheeled on her heels and reprised her traipse, flanked by her unusual companion.  
Side by side, they plunged into a narrow maze of bricks and mortar, momentarily shielding themselves from the bite of winter and fog alike, their bodies warmed by the distant heat of hearths conveyed by the walls that surrounded them.  
Minutes passed, marked by the shuffling of their boots, silence closing around them like an uncomfortable blanket.  
“Here we are,” the man murmured finally.  
They’d stepped into an outcropping, its plentiful -- albeit lifeless -- vegetation clashing with the hypertrophy of cement and cogs that reigned over the city’s aesthetic, surrounding the stern, temple in its middle.  
Its façade was hidden behind two heavy oak doors, its stone blackened by the continuous action of the now extinguished braziers that studded its walls in rhythmic fashion.  
Its spires stretched to the sky, draconic reliefs spiralling upwards and losing themselves in the pollution above.  
Smug felt a pang of nostalgia seize her stomach.  
She hadn’t been there in years.  
That place belonged to another reality, the one that had come before, before all that mess, when the world still seemed a place worth living in.  
She was seeing it with the eyes of a stranger, one that couldn’t begin gauging its familiarity, if not by forcefully piercing through the haze of time and space itself.  
Her mother was right.  
She wasn’t herself anymore.  
That’s why she was there in the first place.

Smug grabbed the collar of her coat and began looking around, unable to locate it.  
“Officer,” she whispered, “where is it?”  
“There.”  
The man raised a finger, pointing somewhere to her left.  
“Right in that nook, behind the drooping cherry tree. The gravel path leads straight to it.”  
Smug sighed.  
“You too, officer?”  
The man nodded, unleashing a sad smile.  
“Yes. Many, many years ago.”  
He stretched a fist to graze his left temple, and Smug unconsciously mirrored his gesture.  
Then, she stumbled forward, feet crunching on loose pebbles, spine bent under the weight of Sin.

The urn sat in near-darkness, its ceramic frame streaked with moisture and soot alike.  
Come Spring, there would be tulips and rose bushes brightening its throne, but Winter had left it naked, nothing but ice and rotting twigs to decorate its cranny.  
Smug fell on her knees, defeat slowing her every gesture as she placed her good palm in her metal one, gathering her thoughts.  
“Ancients have mercy,” she mouthed.  
The urn lid felt heavy, heavier than anything she’s ever lifted.  
She placed it to the side and took a deep breath.  
When her fingers sank in the damp concoction of ashes and coal inside it, she was trembling.  
Her next movements were shaky and uncoordinated, fueled by nothing but despair.  
She cupped her hand and retrieved it, letting the black crumbs sift in her palm for a second.  
“Ancients, forgive me. Father, forgive me. Brother, forgive me.”  
Smug closed her eyes and took off her hat.  
The ashes felt rough against her skin, rogue bits of charred wood scratching her face as she coated her forehead and sockets with black and grey.  
Once she’d finished, she pocketed a lump of coal and let her arm fall on her lap.  
She felt empty, emptier than ever, but also an inch calmer.  
It was a resigned, apathetic kind of calm, one that had clung heavy and tight around her heart, but calm nonetheless.  
When she rose to her full height, her head was spinning.

The officer bowed his head a fraction, grasping the brim of his hat.  
“May thine journey through Hell be brief. Ancients speed thine step, and have mercy on those Marked by Sin.”  
Their hands met mid-air in a frozen pump.  
“Thank you,” Smug uttered.  
“For… everything.”  
“Don’t mention it. At any rate...”  
The guard frowned.  
“It’s dreary cold, madam, and it looks like you could use the comfort of a shelter, at the present time. Please, allow me to call a steamhorse for you.”  
“No.”  
Smug straightened her back and plunged her hands deep into her pockets.  
“Besides, I’m no madam.”  
She started out of the outcropping and into the street.  
“Name’s Zadie Ewicht, and I’m a steamship captain. Or at least, used to be.”  
She raised the collar of her coat, and shivered as she let the city’s bowels fagocitate her once more.  
The officer’s voice tickled her eardrums, growing more and more distant with her every step.  
“Good night, captain Ewicht. And good luck.”


End file.
